As I am writing this article, a neighboring manufacturer is facing an imminent union strike. Without any inside information, I am assuming the reasons for the strike involve frozen pay, suspended benefits or some combination thereof. Last week, I noticed a sign in an Orangeburg fast food restaurant notifying would-be patrons that tomatoes were no longer included on their sandwiches. The tomatoes were now an extra fifty cents. Even the nation of Greece is being asked to cut government spending by ten percent. Everywhere we turn, it seems as if individuals, companies and even nations have heard the loud message of the global economic meltdown and are cutting back.
Over the past two years, no industry was assailed worse than that of the construction and building supply industry. In fact, I am sure everyone reading this article was required to take significant cost saving measures. I am sure these decisions rarely presented easy conclusions. You may be thinking most of the decisions were obvious in light of what was necessary to survive. Notice in my previous sentence, I did not say “obvious;” I said “easy.” Freezing salaries, eliminating benefits and reducing one’s workforce are obvious steps in response to an economic crisis, but they are not easy responses. Like you, Cox tackled many of these obvious but difficult decisions over the past two years. While this feels somewhat revealing, I would like to share with you our decisions and the mindset behind our decision making criteria.
Let me start by saying, all of the equipment, machinery and inventory have almost no meaning and little value without our customers. Secondly, without a reliable supply chain of vendors, we would be powerless to effectively service our customers. So in essence, we realize we are simply a “value-add” proposition between our vendors and our customers. So needless to say, when faced with these most difficult economic times, we knew it was of paramount importance to not only support our customers and vendors, but somehow provide them with additional firepower to combat these difficult times.
On the vendor front, we gathered our most responsive vendors and began the process of consolidating our purchases to those that consistently did what they promised and did it when they promised. In fact, we gathered a group of those vendors in February to further determine what we could do to further strengthen their positions in the difficult market. We received substantial feedback and we continue to focus on making sure the best vendors in the industry will be here for many years to come.
We have always been a customer-focused company, but what else could we do as we found ourselves mired in the economic malaise of the “Great Recession”? Our incredibly successful education program emerged from the redeployment of some of our most valuable resources – people. A group of our best personnel were organized to provide a national outreach program to educate our customers’ customer. To service and support our customers, we decided to expand programs like this one and we did that by finding efficiencies in productions, logistics and purchasing administration. Now as we begin to emerge from the recession, we have established a program that will continue to benefit our customers and help them build a customer community around their stores.
Like you, we made many difficult decisions in 2008, 2009 and 2010, but we made them with our customers, vendors and employees in mind. Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to brighter days ahead. —Mikee
Cox Industries Inc. Blog 